


A Required Notation

by scioscribe



Category: 19th Century CE Danish Literature RPF, Literary RPF
Genre: Bittersweet, First Time, Loss of Virginity, M/M, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-17
Updated: 2017-12-17
Packaged: 2019-02-15 18:37:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13037067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: Scharff necessitates a new kind of shorthand for Andersen's diary.





	A Required Notation

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Deepdarkwaters](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deepdarkwaters/gifts).



> Your love for Andersen in your letter is what made me pick up a biography of him in the first place, so something had to get written! I hope you have a very happy Yuletide. 
> 
> All Andersen info from _Hans Christian Andersen: The Life of a Storyteller_ , by Jackie Wullschlager.

Andersen had hardly expected to encounter other Danes in Paris, but those he did were in nearly all instances preferable to those he met at home; for a time, he took his feelings for Scharff as nothing more than that.  What a joy it is to see you—you of all people, here of all places.  For he had liked very much how Scharff had Denmark's well-worn familiarity gilt-edged with European sensibilities, with a certain worldliness; perhaps, he thought wryly, brought about in part simply because Scharff so openly liked him, a thing he did not encounter quite so much without a bit of travel, did not hear quite so much in his native tongue.

And he had gone so long without speaking any Danish, had spent weeks fumbling along in English as if each word were a wooden block he could hardly spit out, much less assemble noun-by-verb into real conversation.  How ill-mannered Dickens’s children had been about it!  And how frustrating, to get splinters on one’s tongue from trying to speak so badly, when you knew very well you could have built castles in the air.

They had read the stories and liked them; they might have been kinder just because of that.  Still, it was not Dickens’s fault, he had no intention of ever mentioning it to the man.  Kind thanks only were required in his next letter—kind thanks and the fervent wish that they might be reunited soon.

But how unlike all of that was Harald Scharff.  None less pettish, none kinder, none more admiring, and none easier to talk to, though of course he did not now remember what they had talked _about_ , precisely.  No, what he remembered was the way Scharff had moved around Notre Dame, butterfly-quick and –bright in his well-tailored blue coat; how he had laid his hand down on Andersen’s arm to emphasize some point and smiled at him as he’d done it.  A cleft chin and serious eyes that lost all somberness the moment his mouth curved.  No wonder he was a dancer when everything he did had such grace and everyone watched it as though he were on stage—though he was not at all self-conscious about their attention, he was like Jenny in that regard.

 _I am always myself,_ she had told him once, which he had not understood at all, and then, _I am most myself when I have the words and music to be someone else,_ which he had understood perfectly.

Scharff carried the music with him and had no need of words.

+, and the next night, again, +.

(“I met Victor Hugo once,” he’d said, as Scharff flitted to caress a wooden pew here, a bit of marble there.  “I think his _Hunchback_ would hold the memory of this place even if it someday crumbled to dust.”

Scharff had laughed.  “I think your words would hold the memory of Denmark if we all collapsed into the sea, so to preserve a cathedral is nothing so impressive.  Even one as lovely as this.  What did he say to you?”

Oh, God, why had he brought it up when he had no good answer?  “He was very polite but he did not know me—he signed my book but warned me against adding any message there.”

“I would not call that polite.”

“Well, he did it with his eyes.  When someone does something with their eyes, you can never call them impolite, no matter how much you want to,” and so he’d gone on to tell Scharff about the Dickens children.)

Strange how the memories of all that came back at the oddest of times, the way a stray snowflake at the very start of winter could land on your cheek and thus recall every Christmas.

He had not expected then to see Scharff again—one did not generally meet with butterflies more than once—but he had, and having done so, he thought it only right to throw reason to the wind and never mind any of it.  If they had been brought together twice, they could be brought together thrice, could be brought together infinitely.  So they wrote to each other (+) and each batch of letters that came was one delightful, squirmy excuse to debate when to open Scharff’s: at once?  Held back until last, like a peppermint tucked into his cheek?  Held back even until the next day?  No, that he could never manage.

He sent Scharff the photograph of himself, hardly daring to hope for a response even though he himself thought well of it, and could do nothing but (+) rejoice at the answer he received.

_I don’t know why you should see such a picture and say you hardly know yourself, when it is exactly how I remember you—only that you are not smiling!  But I confess I have grown quite adept at making you do what I wish whenever I close my eyes, so I can correct that fault with no trouble.  And that is the only flaw, my dear, because otherwise it is perfect, so perfectly you: noble brow and height and eyes so far away.  Are you looking at me from that chair, I wonder, or only imagining your way into some story?_

Andersen replied: _I imagine myself looking at you through a window, which is a kind of story—what things are we that we can look but not touch?  And what is the glass?  And why do I look?  Because I would see you here before me, clasping my hands in yours, I suppose; I long for us to see each other again._

Oh, he took such risks, to write such words and chance such embarrassment!  To call Scharff _du_ when he was not allowed that liberty even with Edvard!  When his fingers were still burned from having reached out for it, like a boy grabbing at the door of a red-hot stove!

He did not think he believed in it as anything other than a dream (+) until autumn, when they were reunited.  He cautiously read aloud to Scharff things that made him blush.  Not for the first time, he thought what peculiar freedom there was in being a writer, because you could say anything, absolutely anything at all, and have it mistaken for nothing, mere fiction, mere figment, really anything other than a very broken mirror.

Scharff settled down at his feet, his head thrown back against Andersen’s knee: with immense and trembling caution, Andersen put a hand in his hair, which was so sleek and soft, so much thicker than his own.  “Girls must beg you for locks of this.”

“It’s more usually men who ask those from girls,” Scharff said, “and men who ask them from me.”

“Do you give them away?”

“No,” Scharff said, “but I would to you, Hans Christian, if you asked me.”

He watched his fingers shake just slightly.  “But it would be like clipping a bird’s wings.”

“I know very well how I fly on stage, and it’s nothing to do with my hair!  So long as you don’t take my legs, I will fly for you very well all the same.”

But he did not take the offer, not then (+), because it seemed too tempting to be anything other than a bargain.  If this were one of his stories, he would have write it thus, that the gnarled old tree who wished for a lock of the princess's hair even in place of its own leaves would receive what it had asked for, but receive  _only_ that, for the princess would go on to fall in love with someone else.  How could she not?  A princess and a tree, it made no sense.  She would fall for someone who would say, _No, there is no token that can satisfy me, my hunger is for you and you alone, not even some part of you, but only you._ It would not be his best work, but, unwritten, it had its own clumsy kind of truth.

It wasn’t until the new year that they kissed.  He would remember it for the rest of his life—the fresh wintery smell of Scharff suddenly in his arms, the explosion of warmth against his mouth as Scharff pressed his lips there, the wild enthusiasm of him, the animal quality of such a strong young body against his own.  Scharff’s beautifully-muscled thighs against his, Scharff up on his toes to reach his mouth.

+

+

+

Then: oh.  Oh.  Was this the place where words ended?

Scharff took his hand a while and held it and then walked him to the bedroom, pulse against pulse, and in that closed room with curtains drawn across the windows, he found himself getting undressed—not undressing himself but _being brought_ to nakedness, to his bare skin in a slightly too cool room.  Someone needed to start a fire in the grate.

No, no one needed to start a fire anywhere, because this alone would burn him down.  He was the snowman caught in an embrace with the stove.  _How it suits him to put his tongue out_ , Andersen thought as Scharff went down on his knees.

“Touch my hair again,” Scharff said, looking up with a smile.  “Tug all you like, and win your lock of it if you have a mind to, only don’t ask me to wait any longer.”

“No,” Andersen said.  He could feel his heartbeat with a thud that would knock the walls down.  “No, I never will, you can have whatever you like.”

Scharff, with the damned supreme confidence of the young and beautiful, said, “I will show you what I like, then, Hans Christian,” and he did, first on the floor and then on the bed, first with one of them on their knees and then the other.  And even as Scharff was inside him, he thought, _I will make a fool of myself over this boy, I will love him until I die of it._

That night, with Scharff lying in bed beside him, he took up his diary and tried to write something, anything, of what had passed: he wrote of the earliest moments of the visit, when Scharff had asked him if he remembered Notre Dame and Andersen had said of course, when Scharff had asked what else Andersen could read in someone’s eyes.  Flustered then, he had talked of Gerda, had said, _I know you see the beautiful and the good in everything._ Scharff had answered, _Then will you make a hero of me?  That I will travel half the world for you?_

That far he could go, but no further, not without risking something worse than foolishness, should anyone come across this book.  But at the end of it, he started to draw the usual symbol, and then realized it was not right.  What should he do?  Turn it on its side, into an X?  Double it, one mark stacked on top of the other, to symbolize the number of participants?  But this had not been his usual habit with some mere addition.  It had been entirely new.  He did not even know enough of it yet to say whether it had been two separate acts or only one.

At last he ended the entry with O, as different a thing from + as he could think of, a shape like an embrace or an open mouth, a shape with an emptiness worried down into the center of it.  It was all he could think of.  He touched Scharff’s hair in the near dark of the room, for Scharff lay outside the wobbly field of candlelight.  But he would keep thinking of possibilities for as long as he could.  He would bend his imagination to the task until he found the paper cut-out of them both, until he could, by the absence of what was said, by the whiteness on the page, convey what all was there, what had happened to his heart, the gap inside him that would be left when this was gone.  But for now, just the circle of his arms.


End file.
